Going to middle school.

Going to middle school.

Every school that I’ve been to in China has a solid band of color painted to about 4 feet up the wall. It’s just something I’ve started to notice; my dorm has it, the high school across from our building has it, the middle school we visited in the countryside has it. It actually breaks up the space really well, and like everything else in China, the walls and the paint look old, but spotless and well used.

We went to this school to practice our Chinese as well as letting the middle school students practice their English on us, probably the first foreigners they’ve ever had a chance to talk to.


Walking up to the middle school, it looks devoid of life. At the start, it seems to be a massive gate marking a path to nowhere, a stretch of cracking pavement surrounded on either side by yellowed grass. The road turns a corner into a tiled courtyard, corralled by whitewashed walls. The school’s four basketball hoops preside over empty space.

Chinese has a particular word, nongcun, whose meaning includes everywhere that’s not within a modern city, including everything from Beijing’s suburbs to the most spare farming village in the vastness of China. It seems a little unfair to call the space the school is in “the countryside”, but my teachers continuously used that word, nongcun, to describe where we were going. Every classroom has a laptop and a projector descending from the ceiling, the school is only an hour and a half ride out of the center of Beijing, it’s modernized. So why “countryside”?


We foreigners took our turn first presenting a few aspects of American and Japanese culture to the middle school students. The topics we covered were mostly in relation to ordinary life, the routine of American middle school and college students, what after school activities are. There are differences between what we went through and what these middle school students are going through now that are easily overlooked.


For one, Chinese school’s emphasis on foreign language, specifically our own mother tongue, is a far cry from when I started Spanish in 7th grade. Talking to one of the students, I asked how long he had been studying English. Turns out he started when he was three.


After we finished our reports, the middle school students one by one went up to the podium, loaded their powerpoints into the overhead projector through the laptop in the desk, and started speaking.

Powerpoints? Overhead projectors? Granted, it’s the Future now, and it wasn’t when I was in middle school, but half the time our college classrooms’ projectors broadcast a lovely blue and little else.


The students’ topics ranged from their Best Friends, how much they love their parents, how they don’t study hard enough, all the way to Basketball. Basketball is something of a religion among Chinese guys, and the middle school kids were no exception. Clearly some things aren’t too different from our respective hometowns. “Kobe Bryant is my hero,” said one student falteringly, “that’s why my English name is Basketball Star.”


As far as the students’ English went, it was pretty good, especially considering they’re in middle school. The kids’ faces were visibly pained as they struggled through the words, often slipping into a mix something like Chinese syllables strung into English sentences. We probably looked the same way to them. We foreigners, not wearing the middle school track suit-uniform, trying to speak to a bunch of Chinese middle school students in their own language while they tried to speak to us in ours.


When the classroom presentations were finished we all left together to take a picture outside of the school. The sun glared off the paving stones and the wind blew Beijing’s dry cold through the doorways. As our teachers took the photos, standing next to me was one kid I had been talking to for most of our time at the school. He was tall for his age and tall for China and gangly as any middle school boy. He looked out into the sun and squinted his eyes and said into the air, “so you’ll be going back to America soon, right?”

“Have you liked living in Beijing?”


China has a countryside, a nongcun where people make their living farming. It’s not here, though. Here is Beijing. I would be willing to bet within 5 years the city will encompass this middle school and the students will spend the rest of their lives working in the city, for the city. Right now they’re just still growing up.

Testing.

Testing.


The other day the topic for our daily textbook reading was this Chinese test called the Gaokao, literally translated, kind of a shorthand for ‘High School test’. The test determines not only which college you attend, but also your major. The subject you study for four years. It’s the biggest moment of a Chinese student’s high school career. Easy to see why when it decides such a big part of your life.

So much for aptitude tests, right?


My roommate told me that the time leading up to this test was literally the hardest part of his life so far. After school activities? After freshman year, nothing. Sports? Maybe in your gym class. Going out with friends? Sorry, you have to study. All of your time is spent preparing, endlessly, for this one test.

My roommate looks up from his college civil engineering homework. “After school we didn't do anything else. Eating dinner took maybe 15 minutes. After eating I went back to studying.”

"It's not that the Chinese educational system has problems," he says, "It's that the Chinese educational system is a problem." The remark's a little hard to translate, but I hope the meaning comes through. The idea I get of this period in a Chinese student's life is that it's a black hole of studying. It's all that exists. Despite the problems, my roommate says, "There's no other way. You can't not take the test."


Gaokao lasts for two days: 5 hours a day with a break between morning and afternoon. This is a change from before when it was 3 days long. The Chinese government recently moved the test from July to June because they couldn’t turn on the air conditioning during the worst of the summer and it was too hot for the students to work.

In our classtime discussion, the Gaokao test was compared to the SATs for American students. “Don’t the SATs determine where you go to college?” our twenty-four year old teacher asks.

Well. Partly, I guess.


The SAT is long, sure. When I took it the test lasted 4 hours one morning. Stressful, of course. Life-defining? Not entirely. We American students have other activities. What are colleges looking at in the states?

1. What can you give us?
2. How many foreign countries have you been to?
3. What has been the defining moment of your life?
4. Tell us in paragraphs.

Looking back on it, it’s a pretty loose system, one that has benefited myself and so many of my friends. We have a choice. We have time to prove ourselves. We have our hobbies, we have our friends.


We certainly have more than just a number to throw at admission-folk in the US. Here? One of the sentences in our reading put forth rather matter-of-factly, "Chinese high school students don't have the time to develop their own interests." Your Gaokao grade is your major, it is your career.


In China, what’s left but the numbers? Think about the things you hear so often. Four babies. Billions of people. Ten percent growth. One chance. One test.

That China is killing us in math and science is an often quoted fact. How are the students getting there? The testing process isn't something you hear about when you hear about Chinese education.

You hear the numbers. You hear millions of engineers every year. Maybe some would rather study literature.